The inf inite public shopping list

With a provincial election coming, it’s open season on Ontario taxpayers. Responding to NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s promise of universal pharmacare, Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Tuesday if she’s re-elected, admittedly a big if, her Liberal government, which offers free drugs for Ontarians under 25, will also offer them for those aged 65 and over. She didn’t actually see Horwath’s pharmacare bid. Nor did she raise it, but she did commit her party to a big chunk of new spending.

It’s a democracy. We’ve got to have elections. But election-time bidding wars for voters’ favours can get very expensive.

What’s a conservative to do? If you recognize fiscal reality and decline to wave your paddle at the auctioneer, you look like Scrooge or the Grinch. “Don’t you conservatives care about the millions — millions — of Ontarians struggling to buy the drugs they need, the Ontarians slicing their pills in half to make their prescriptions last longer? How heartless can you be?”

Fiscal responsibility is a perfectly honourable reaction to proposals for big step-jumps in the size of the welfare state. No one on this page will quarrel with it. If taxes get too high, the economy will languish and there won’t be enough new revenues to pay for the spending hikes. Either that or the money will be borrowed, as so much has been borrowed already, and that won’t work in the long run, either, as even those millions of Ontarians who don’t pay income taxes probably understand. But fiscal responsibility — “We can’t afford it!” — is such a negative argument. Even worse, it gives away the merits of the case, with its implication that if we could afford it, then of course we conservatives would happily join in the gift-giving.

But would we? Should we? Could we not construct a more positive argument, as part of a more positive social vision, for saying no?

The vision the NDP and Liberals are painting is as a province gradually becomes richer its government will use the revenues that come rolling in to provide ever more goods and services. When Canadians were much poorer, governments limited themselves to law enforcement, defence and elementary education. As incomes grew and given tax rates raised more and more revenue, essential spending came to include unemployment insurance, old age pensions, health care, worker’s comp, daycare, parental leave and a number of other services.

Now the argument is that Ontario is rich enough to buy drugs for its citizens, either all of them in the NDP plan or just people at either end of the age spectrum, as in the Liberal vision, though you have to assume the Liberals eventually would fill in the middle, too. There’s talk of free dentistry, as well, because if you have bad teeth in this society, that can prevent your full development as a human being. Where does it stop? Trick question. It doesn’t stop. Anything “millions of Ontarians” are struggling to afford eventually can be fair game for state provision. Millions of Ontarians are forced to make housing choices, or car choices, or vacation choices, or entertainment choices, or dining out choices that are less pleasant than their neighbours can make. Many of us might shortsightedly think of such things as luxuries, rather than necessities. But the history of our public policy is that luxuries morph into necessities. Who would deny anyone on welfare access to the internet, or a colour TV?

Ever-expanding public financing of an everlengthening list of goods and services is one vision of how Ontario and Canada might evolve. But what about the possibility, as more and more people have higher education and their incomes rise and rise, that they take more and more responsibility for their own lives, rather than increase their dependency on their fellow citizens and the bureaucrats who assume control over more and more of what they do?

This positive vision of the Ontario and Canada of the future doesn’t mean all the goods and services citizens want to consume have to be financed by out-of-pocket cash spending. Insurance companies, co-operatives and other institutions can get into the competition to supply this or that contingency or assurance. And the state can put a floor under people’s well-being, a floor that slowly rises as incomes in general rise.

That capable, can-do people who are becoming richer and richer take more and more control over their lives is not the vision we’ve become accustomed to over the last half-century. But it’s a thoroughly positive vision and it’s what people always say they want from politicians — something new and completely different.